Then you see it!
At first you are amusedly contemptuous. "How perfectly hideous," you say to yourself. And then, in your idleness of mind, your eye follows the roses and ribbons in horrible contortions from the skirting board to the ceiling. Realising what you are doing, and knowing that in that direction madness lies, you immediately turn your gaze towards the window. You imagine that you have gained the day. But, alas!you are wrong! Comes a moment in the early morning when you wake up two hours before you wanted to, with nothing else to do except to lie awake thinking. And all the while the brown roses with their blue buds have unconsciously stretched their tendrils to seize your wandering regard. Before you realise what they are doing, your eyes are riveted on that horrible bunch half-way up the wall which being cut in half by the sudden termination of the width of one paper roll, does not exactly fit the corresponding half of the other. How it suddenly begins to irritate you—this break in the symmetry of the design! You force your eyes from contemplating its offence, only to discover that the bunches of roses which are exposed between the sides of the picture representing "The Soul's Awakening" and the illuminated text painted by your hostess when she was young, makean exact square. Above the pictures you perceive that these same bunches form a "diamond," resting on one of its right angles! That there are only five of these terrible bunches between the side of "The Soul's Awakening" and the corner of the wall, andsixbetween that of "Trust in the Lord" and the door. And all the time you are becoming more and more irritable. You cannot close your eyes because you know that when you open them again the same illustrations from Euclid will await you. The only thing that comforts you is the determination to write immediately to your Member of Parliament insisting that he drafts a Bill creating a censor of wallpapers, with dire penalties for any "circumventors" of the law. That at least would put every seaside landlady in prison.
Our Irritating Habits
Far more than the Big Things are the Teeny Weeny Little Ones which more quickly divide lovers. A woman may conveniently overlook the fact that her husband poisoned his first wife in order to marry her, when she cannot ignore the perpetual example which he gives her of the truth that Satan finds some evil still for idle hands to do—by always picking his teeth. All of us possess some little irritating personal habit, which makes for us more enemies than those faults for which, on our knees, we beg forgiveness of Heaven. A woman can drink in the poetry of her lover's passionate eloquence for ever and ever, amen. But if, in the middle of the night, she wakes up to find her eloquent lover letting forth the most stentorian snores she, metaphorically, immediately sits up in bed and begins seriouslyto wonder. And the moment love begins to ask itself questions, it is, as it were, turning over the leaves of the time-table to discover the next boat for the Antipodes. As I said before, more homes are broken up, not by the flying fire-irons, but by the irritating little personal idiosyncrasies which men and women exhibit when they are, so they declare, "quite natural and at their ease." Only a mother's love can survive the accompaniment of suction noises with soup. Vice always makes the innocent suffer, but suffering is often bearable, and sometimes it ennobles us; but chewing raw tobacco—even perpetually chewing chewing gum—is unbearable, and has a most ignoble effect on the temper, especially the temper of life's Monday mornings.
Even for our virtues do we sometimes run the risk of being murdered by those who, because they think they know us best, consequently admire us least. Virtue which is waved overhead like a banner is always a perpetual challenge, and the moment we seem to issue a challenge—even though we merely challenge the surrounding ether—someone in the concrete bends down somewhere to pick up a brickbat and, gazing at us, mutters, "How far? Oh Lord, how far?" Even the expressions of love, in the wrong place, have been known to hear hatred as their echo. I once knew a man who left his wife because she could never speak to him without calling him "darling." She had so absorbed Barrie's theory that the bravest man is but a "child," that "home" for her husband became a kind of glorified nursery. At last his spirit became bilious with the cloying sweetness of it all. The climax came one evening when, after accidentally treading on her best corn and begging her pardon, she got up, put her loving arms around his neck and, kissing him, whispered, "Granted, darling,grantedbefore you did it!" Soon after that he left her for a woman who, herself, trod on every corn he possessed, and had not the least inclination to say she was sorry. Of course, he lived to regret his first wife. Most men do.
"Tact," I suppose, is at the bottom of all the difficulty—tact not only to know instinctively what to do and when to do it, but when to realise that a wife is still an "audience" and when to realise that, so far as being completely natural in her company is concerned, she has absolutely ceased to exist. But, alas! no one has the heart to teach us this necessary lesson in "tact." We can tell a man of his sin when we dare not tell him it were the better plan to go right away by himself when he wishes to take his false teeth out. A wife will promote an angry scene with her husband over the "other woman"—of whom she is not in the least bit jealous—when she will never dream of telling him that he doesn't sufficiently wash—which was the real cause of their early estrangement. Everybody knows his own vices, whereas most people are blissfully ignorant of their own irritating idiosyncrasies. I would far sooner be told of my nasty habits than of my own special brand of original sin. Sin has to be in very disgusting form to evoke lasting dislike, whereas a "nasty habit" breeds DISGUST, which is a far more terrible emotion than hatred.
Away—Far Away!
"The bird was there, and rose and fell as formerly, pouring out his melody; but it was not the same. Something was missing from those last sweet languishing notes. Perhaps in the interval there had been some disturbing accident in his little wild life, though I could hardly believe it since his mate was still sitting about thirty yards from the tree on the five little mottled eggs in her nest. Or perhaps his midsummer's music had reached its highest point and was now in its declension. And perhaps the fault was in me. The virtue that draws and holds us does not hold us always nor very long; it departs from all things, and we wonder why. The loss is in ourselves, although we do not know it. Nature, the chosen mistress of our heart, does not change towards us, yet she is now, even to-day—
Less full of purple colour and hid spice,
and smiles and sparkles in vain to allure us, and when she touches us with her warm caressing touch, there is, compared with yesterday, only a faint response." I cull this paragraph from Mr. W. H. Hudson's enchanting book, "Birds in Town and Village," because, or so it seems to me, it expresses in beautiful language a fact which has puzzled me all through my life, making me fear to dare in many things, lest the enthusiasm I then felt were not repeated when the time for action arrived. We are all more or less creatures of mood, some more than others, and I, alas! among the moodiest majority. All through the long, dark, chilly, miserable winter I live in town, longing sadly, though rapturously, for the summer to come again, and with its advent my own migration into rural solitudes, far away from the crowd, surrounded by Nature and lost in her embrace. Yet the end of each summer finds me with my pilgrimage not yet undertaken. Something has held me back—a friendship, business, links which were only imaginary fetters, a host of trivial unimportances masquerading in my mood of the moment as serious affairs. So the summer has come and gone, and only for an all-too-brief period have I "got away." Nor have I particularly enjoyed my respite from the roar of omnibuses, the tramp, tramp, tramp of the crowded pavements. Somehow or other the war has robbed me of my love of solitude Somehow or other the peace and beauty and solitude of Nature still "hurt" me, as they used to hurt me during the years of the great world tragedy when, across the meadows brilliant with buttercups and daisies, there used to come the booming of the guns not so very far away "out there." So, in order to force my mood, and perhaps deaden remembrance of its pain, I have taken along with me some human companion, only once more to realise that, when with Nature, each of us should be alone. One yearns to watch and listen, listen and watch, to lie outstretched on the hill-side, gazing lazily, yet with mind alert, at every moving thing which happens to catch one's eye. You can rarely do this in company. So very, very few people can simply exist silently without sooner or later breaking into speech or falling fast asleep. Alone with Nature books are the only possible company—books and one's own unspoken thoughts.
"Family Skeletons"
The worst of keeping a "Family Skeleton" shut up in a cupboard is that the horrid thingwill insiston rattling its old bones at the most inopportune moments—just, for example, when you are entertaining to tea the nearest local thing you've got to God—whether she be an "Honourable" (in her own right, mark you!) or merely the vicar's wife! Whatever family skeletons do or do not possess, they most assuredly lacktact. They are worse than relations for giving your "show away" at the wrong moment. If relations do nothing else, they at any rate sit tightly together around family skeletons, if only to hide them from full view by the crowd. But, of course, the crowd always sees them. The crowd always seeseverythingyou don't want it to see, and is quite blind to the triumphal banners you are waving at it out of your top-room window. Sometimes I think that the better plan in regard to family skeletons is to expose them to public view without any dissembling whatsoever, crying to the world at large, and to the "woman who lives opposite" in particular, "There! that'sourfamily disgrace! Everybody's got one. What'syours?" I believe that this method would shut most people up quite satisfactorily. People only try to learn what they believe you do not want them to know. If you push the truth before them, they turn away their heads. To pretend is usually useless. Not very many of us get through life without experiencing a desire to hide something which everybody has already seen. Wiser far be honest, even if it costs you a disagreeable quarter of an hour. Better one disagreeable quarter of an hour than months and years sitting on a bombshell which any passer-by can explode. Honesty is always one of the very few invulnerable things. No pin-pricks can pierce it—and pin-pricks are usually the bane of life. It's like laughter, in that nobody has yet been found to parry its blows successfully. Shame is a sure sign of possible defeat—and the world always ranges itself every time on the side of the probable victor. If you once show people that youcan'tbe hurt in the way they are trying to hurt you, they soon leave off trying, and begin to think of your Christian virtues in general and their own more numerous ones in particular. It's only when your courage is sheer camouflage that the world tries to penetrate the disguise. Not until a woman dips her hair in henna and, metaphorically speaking, cries, "See how young I look now!" that other women begin to remark, "You know, dear, she isnot so youthful as she was!" It's only when the rumour goes round that a man has had a financial misfortune that everybody to whom he owes anything fling in their bills. And thus it is with family skeletons. If, as it were, you ask them to live with you downstairs, everybody ignores them and finds them "frightfully dull." But the moment you relegate them into the topmost attic—lo and behold, every single one of your acquaintances expresses a desire to rush upstairs, ostensibly to look at the view.
Everybody has something which they do not want to expose—like dirty linen. But everybody's linen gets dirty—that is always something to remember. There are some poor old fools, however, who really do seem to imagine that they and theirs are alone immaculate. How they manage to do so I can never for the life of me imagine. They must be very stupid. But stupid people are a very great factor in life's everyday, and we must always try to do something with them, like the left-over remnants of Sunday's dinner. And, unless we do something with them, they—like Sunday's dinner—meet our gaze every time we go into the kitchen. At last we hate the sight of them. But, just as the remnants clinging to an old mutton-bone lose their terror when Monday arrives without the butcher, so these interfering old fools sometimes fade away into harmless acquaintances when you show them that you and your family skeleton are part and parcel of the same thing, and if they wish to know the one they'll have to accept the other. In any case, it's usually useless to try and pretend that Uncle George died of heart failure when he really died of drink, or that the young girl whom Aunt Maria "adopted" was a waif-and-stray, when everybody knows she is her own daughter; or that your first wife isn't still alive—probably kicking—or that your only child suddenly went to Australia because he was seized by the wander-lust, when everybody knows he had to go there or go to prison. You may, of course, pretend these things, and if you don't mind the perpetual worry of always pretending, well and good. But if you imagine for one instant that your pretending deceives the gallery, you'll be extremely silly. Why, every time they speak of you behind your back they'll preface their remarks with information of this kind: "Yes, yes . . . acharmingfamily. What a thousand pities it is that they alldrink!"
But the "skeletons" of our own character—theyare the ones which no cupboard can hold, nor any key lock in. Some time, sooner or later, out they will come to do a jazz in front of the whole world. The life we lead in the secret chambers of our own hearts we shall one day enact on the house-roof. Strive as we may to conform to the conventional ideal of public opinion, we cannot conformallthe time, and our lapses are our undoing—or maybe, our happy emancipation, who knows? We cannot hide the pettiness of our nature, even though we profess the broadest principles. Only one thing can save the ungenerous spirit, and that is to be up against life single-handed and alone. To know suffering, spiritual as well as physical; to know poverty, to know loneliness, sometimes to know disgrace, broadens the heart and mind more than years spent in the study of Greek philosophy. Life is the only real education, and the philosophy which we evolve through living the only philosophy of any real importance in the evolution of "souls."
The Dreariness of One Line of Conduct
We have lots of ways of expressing that a man is in a "rut" without ever giving the real reason of our adverse criticisms. An author who has "written himself out," an artist whose pictures we can recognise without ever looking at the catalogue, the "conventional," the "dull," the lovers who have fallen out of love—these are all so many victims of the "rut" in life. It is not their fault either. "Ruts" seem so safe, so delightful—at the beginning. We rush into them as we would rush into Heaven—and Heaven surely will be a terrible "rut" unless people have described it wrongly! But, although "ruts" may often mean a comfortable existence, they are the end of all progress. We dig ourselves in, and make for ourselves a dug-out. But people in dug-outs are onlysafe; they've got to come out of them some time and go "over the top" if they want to win a war. Unfortunately, in everyday life, the people who deliberately leave their dug-outs generally get fired at, not only by their enemies but also by their friends. But they have to risk that. So few people can realise the terrible effect which "staleness" has upon certain minds. Staleness is the breeding ground for all sorts of social diseases which most people attribute to quite other causes. There is a staleness in work as well as in amusement, in love as well as in hate. Variety is the only real happiness—variety, and a longing for the improbable. What we have we never appreciate after we have had it for any length of time. Doctors will tell you that an illness every nine years is a great benefit to a man. It makes him appreciate his health when it returns to him; it gives his body that complete rest which it can only obtain, as a rule, during a long convalescence, while "spiritually" it brings him face to face with death—which is quite the finest thing for clearing away the cobwebs which are so apt to smother the joy and beauty of life. In the same way a complete change in the mode of living keeps a man's sympathies alive, his mental outlook clear, his enthusiasms bright; it gives him understanding, and a keener appreciation of the essentials which go to make up the real secret of happiness, the real joy of living. The people we call "narrow" are always the people whose life is deliberately passed in a "rut." They may have health, and wealth, and nearly all those other things which go to make a truce in this battle we call Life, but because they have been used to all these blessings so long, they have ceased to regard them. And a man who is not keenly alive to his own blessings is a man who is neither happy nor of much good to the world in which he lives. You have to be able to appreciate your own good fortune in order to realise the tragedy of the less fortunate.
The Happy Discontent
What is the happiest time of a man's life? Not the attainment of his ambitions, but when the attainment isjust in sight. Every man and woman must have something to live for, otherwise they become discontented or dull. People wonder at the present unrest among the working classes. But to me this unrest is inevitable to the conditions in which they live. They have no ideal to light up their drudgery with glory. They cannot express themselves in the dull labour which is their daily task. They just have to go on and on doing the same monotonous jobs, not in order to enjoy life, but just in order to live at all. Their "rut" is well-nigh unendurable. Of what good, for example, is education, an appreciation of art and beauty, any of those things, in fact, which are the only things which make life splendid and worth living, if all one is asked to do, day in, day out, is to clean some lift in the morning and pull it up and down all the rest of the day! To me the wonder of the working classes is, not that they are restless, but that they are not allmad! Were they doing their tasks for themselves, I can imagine even the dullest work might become interesting, because it would lead, if well done, to development and self-expression. But to do these mechanical labours solely and entirely for other people, and to know that you must keep on doing them or starve, well, it seems to me a man needs for his own sanity everythingoutsidehis work to make life worth living. The man who is working for himself, no matter how dreary his occupation may be, is rarely restless. He has ambition; there is competition to keep his enthusiasms alive, he feels that, however lowly his labour may be, it belongs to him, and its success is his success, too. But can anyone imagine what a life must be, we will say, cleaning other people's windows for a wage which just enables him to live? I can imagine it, and, in putting myself in that position, I cast envious eyes on the freedom of tramps! It seems to me that, until the world wakes up to the necessity of enabling work-people to fill their leisure hours with those amusements and pleasures, of the intellect as well as of the body, which are the reward of wealth, there will always be a growing spirit or revolution in the world. I could endure almost any drudgery for eight hours provided during the rest of the day I could enjoy those things for which my spirit craved. But to do that same drudgery, day in, day out, with nothing but a Mean Street to come home to, nothing but a "pub" to give me social joy, while people who appear to live entirely for enjoying themselves bespatter me with mud from their magnificent motor-cars as they drive past me with, metaphorically speaking, their noses in the air, I think I, too, should turn Bolshevik, not because I would approve of Bolshevism, or even understand what it meant, but because it would seem to give me something to live for. Except for the appalling suffering, the death, the disease, the sad "Good-byes" of those who loved one another, I am beginning to realise that the world was a finer place in war time. It mingled the classes as they have never been mingled before, for the untold benefit of every class, it brought out that spirit of kindness and self-sacrifice which was the most really Christian thing that the world has seen on such a large scale since the beginning of Christianity; it seemed to give a meaning to life, and to make even the meanest drudgery done for the Great Cause a drudgery which lost all its soul-numbing attributes—that horrible sense of the drudgery of drudgery which is sometimes more terrible to contemplate than death. Religion ought to give to life some, if not all this noble meaning. But, alas! it doesn't. I sometimes think that only those who are persecuted for their beliefs know what real religion is. The Established Church doesn't, anyway. The world of workers isdemandinga faith, but the Church only gives it admonition, or a charming address by a bishop on the absolute necessity of going to church. The clergy never seem to ask themselves what the people are going to receive in the way of rendering their daily toil more worth while when they do go to church. But the people have answered it with tragic definiteness. Theystay away! Or perhaps they go to see a football match. Well, who shall blame them, after the kind of work which they have been forced to do during the week? I always think that if only the Church followed the crowd, instead of, metaphorically speaking, banging the big drum outside their churches and begging them to come inside, they would "get hold" of their flock far more effectively. After all, why should religion be so divorced from the joy of life? Death is important, but life is far more so. If the clergy entered into thereal lifeof the people they would benefit themselves through a greater understanding, and the people would benefit by this living example of Christianity in their midst. But so many of the clergy seem to forget the fact that the leisured classes possess, by their wealth alone, the opportunity to create their own happiness. The poor have not this advantage. Their work is, for the most part, deadening. The surroundings in which they live offer them so little joy. They have only the amusements which they can snatch from their hours of freedom to make life worth living at all. And these amusements are the all-important things, it seems to me. If you can enter into the hours of happiness of men and women, they will be willing to follow you along those pathways which lead to a greater appreciation of the Christ ideal. I always think that if the Church devoted itself to the happiness of its "flock" it would do far more real good than merely devoting itself to their reformation. Reformation can only come when a certain amount or inner happiness has been attained.
Book-borrowing Nearly Always Means Book-stealing
Whenever I lend a book—and, in parenthesis, I never lend a book of which I am particularly fond—I always say "good-bye" to it under my breath. I have found that, whereas the majority of people are perfectly honest when dealing with thousands, their sense of uprightness suddenly leaves them when it is only a question of a thr'penny-bit. As for books and umbrellas, people seem to possess literally no conscience in regard to them. Umbrellas youmay, perhaps, get back—if you were born under the "lucky star" with a "golden spoon" in your mouth, and had an octogenarian millionaire, with no children, standing—or peradventurepropped up—as god-parent at your christening. Few people have qualms about asking for the return of an umbrella, whereas a book always gets either "Not-quite-finished-been-so-busy" for an answer, or else the borrower has been so entranced by it that he has "taken the liberty" to lend it to a friend because he knew you wouldn'tmind! (Of course you don't—you only feel like murder!) Nor do you really mind, providing that you are indifferent as to the ultimate fate of the volume. If you are not indifferent . . . well, you won't have lent it, that's all; it will recline on the bookshelf of the literary "safe"—which is in your own bedroom, because your own bedroom is the only place where a book ever is really safe. (Have you noticed how reluctant people always are to ask for the loan of a book which lies beside your bed? It is as if this traditional lodgment of the family Bible restrained them. Usually they never even examine bedside books. They are always so embarrassed when they happen to pick up a volume of the type of "Holy Thoughts for Every Day of the Year." They never know what to say to that!) But a book which lies about downstairs is the legitimate prey of every book "pincher" who strays across your threshold. Moreover, no one has yet invented a decent excuse for refusing to lend a book. I wish they had; I would use it until it was threadbare. You can't very well say what you really think, since no one likes to be refused the loan of anything because the owner feels convinced that he will never get it back. So, unless you have a particular gift for the Lie-Immediate, which embraces either the assertion that the book in question does not belong to you or else that you have promised it to somebody else, you meekly utter the prayer that you will be delighted if the borrower thereof will only be kind enough to let you have it back soon, which, all the time, you know he won't, and he knows he won't, and you know that he knows he won't, and he knows that you know that he won't—all of which passes through your respective minds as he pockets the book, and you in your heart of hearts bid it a fond farewell!
Other People's Books
I have come to the conclusion that the only books which people are really fond of are those which rightly belong to other people. To them they are always faithful. They are faithful to them notin spite of themselves, which is the way with those "classics" which everybody is supposed to have read while they were young, and which most people only know by name, because they belong to that dim and distant future in which are included all those things which can be done when they are old—they are faithful to them for the reason that nobody wants to borrow them; they belong to the literature which people seek infreelibraries, if they seek it at all. The books they really adore are those which somebody else has purchased. Nor are they ever old books. On the contrary, they are "the very latest." You see it gives a room a certaincachetif it includes the very recent literary "sensation," the "novel of the season," which everybody is reading because everybody is talking about it. So they stick to the books which you yourself have purchased, under the fond delusion that what you buy is necessarily yours to do what you like with. Alas! you have forgotten the borrowing fiend. The borrowing fiend is out for borrowed glory—and few things on earth will ever stop the progress of those who are out for self-glorification. True, I once knew a book-lover who was not afraid of telling the would-be borrower that henever lent books. Needless to say, he had very few literary friends. But his bookshelves were filled with almost everything worth reading that had been published.
The Road to Calvary
She was sitting half dreaming, half listening to the old preacher, when suddenly one sentence in a sermon, otherwise prosy and conventional, arrested her attention. For the moment she could not remember it, and then it came to her. "All roads lead to Calvary." Perhaps he was going to be worth listening to at last. "To all of us sooner or later," he was saying, "comes the choosing of the ways: either the road leading to success, the gratification of desires, the honour and approval of our fellow men—or the path to Calvary." And yet it seems to me that the utterance is only a half-truth after all. It is the half-truth which clergymen like to utter. They always picture worldly success as happiness, the gratification of desires happiness also, but gained at the price of one's own "soul." But there they are wrong. It seems to me that all roads do lead to Calvary—yes, even the road of the worldly success, the limelit path of gratification. Whichever path you take, it leads to Calvary—though there is the Calvary which, as it were, has peace behind its pain, and the Calvary which has merely loneliness and regret. But life, it seems to me, leads to Calvary whichever way you follow—the best one can do is merely to bring a little ray of happiness, ease a little the pain, share the sorrow and the solitude of those who walk with us along the rough-hewn pathway. If you live only for yourself you are lonely; if you live only for others you are also left lonely at last. For it seems to me that the "soul" of every man and woman is a lonely "soul," no matter if their life be one long round of pleasure-seeking and success, or merely renunciation. Only occasionally, very, very occasionally—maybe only once in a lifetime!—do we ever really feel that our own "soul" and the "soul" of another has met for an all-too-brief moment, shared for a flash its "secret," mutually sympathised and understood. For the rest—well, we live for the most part holding out, as it were, shadowy arms towards shadows which onlyseemto be substance. The road to Calvary is a lonely road, and each man and woman is forced to follow it. There remains then only God—God who knows us for what we are; God—and the faith that in a life beyond we shall by our loved ones be also recognised and known. For the rest, we but look at each other yearningly through iron bars—and from a long, long distance. The least lonely road which leads to Calvary is the road which leads to God; the least lonely pilgrims are those who walk with Him. But not everybody can believe in God, no matter how they yearn. They seek "soul" realisation in success, in self-gratification, in the applause and passion of the crowd. The "religious" men condemn and despise them. But they are wrong. They are more to be pitied. For they do not find consolation in the things by which they have sought to drug the loneliness of their inner life. Their Calvary is often the most terrible of all. So it seems to me that Calvary is at the end of whichever road we take. We are wise when we realise that it is in our own power to make that road brighter and happier for others, and that there are always halts of interest and delight, entertainment and joy, dotted along it for ourselves as well—if we look for them. But we do not escape Calvary even though we struggle for success, gratify our own desires, seek the honour and approval of our fellow-men. It is just the Road of Life, and, provided that we harm no other man in so doing, let us realise ourselves in worldly ambition and in love and in enjoyment as often as we may. That is my philosophy, but it is no less lonely in reality than other people's. Old age is each man's Calvary.
Mountain Paths
And the worst of that road to Calvary which we all of us must follow, whether it be a long or short way, is that it is always, as it were, a lonely journey into the Unknown. It is a mystery—a terrific mystery—and sometimes it frightens us so terribly that men and women have been known to kill themselves rather than take it. But there is always this to be said of sorrow—like happiness, it looms so very much larger when seen from a long way off. As we approach it it becomes smaller. When we reach it, sometimes it does not seem so very terrible after all; either it is small or else Nature or God gives to all of us some added courage which helps us to bear even the greatest affliction. For several years past I have been intimately associated with a tragedy which most people regard as well-nigh unsurmountable even by the bravest heart. I have thought so myself—and there are moments when I think so still, in spite of my long familiarity with it, and the miracles of bravery I have seen displayed in hearts so young and so tender that one would have thought they must of necessity fall helpless beneath the burden laid upon them by Fate. I speak, of course, of the Blinded Soldier—than whom no better example of courage on the road to Calvary could possibly be given. Personally, I feel that I would sooner be dead than blind; but I realise now that I only feel this way because I still, thank Heaven, have remarkably good sight. Were I to lose my eyes, I hope—perhaps Iknow—that I should still strive to fight cheerfully onward. And this, not because I am naturally brave—I am not—but because I have lived long enough to see that when, metaphorically speaking, the axe falls, some added strength is given to the spirit which, granted bodily health, can fight and go on fighting an apparently overwhelming foe. This is one of the most wonderful miracles of Human Life, and I have myself seen so many instances of it that I know it to be no mere fiction of an optimistic desire, but an acknowledged fact. And this miracle applies to nations as well as to individuals. In Maurice Maeterlinck's new volume of essays there is one on "The Power of the Dead." "Our memories are to-day," he writes, "peopled by a multitude of heroes struck down in the flower of their youth and very different from the pale and languid cohort of the past, composed almost wholly of the sick and the old, who had already ceased to exist before leaving the earth. We must tell ourselves that now, in every one of our homes, both in our cities and in the country-side, both in the palace and in the meanest hovel, there lives and reigns a dead young man in the glory of his strength. He fills the poorest, darkest dwelling with a splendour of which it had never ventured to dream. His constant presence, imperious and inevitable, diffuses and maintains a religion and ideas which it had never known before, hallows everything around it, makes the eyes look higher, prevents the spirit from descending, purifies the air that is breathed and the speech that is held and the thoughts that are mustered there, and, little by little, ennobles and uplifts the whole people on a scale of unexampled vastness." Surely, in beautiful words such as these, Maeterlinck but echoes the consolation of many a very lonely heart since the tragedy of August, 1914. Without "my boy"—many a desolate heart imagined that it could never face the road of Calvary which is life now that he is gone. And yet, when the blow came, something they thought would have vanished for ever still remained with them. They could not tell if it were a "presence," felt but unseen, but this theyknew—though they could not argue their convictions—that everything which made life happy, which lent it meaning, was not lost, had not faded away before the life-long loneliness which faced them; it still lived on—lived on as an Inspiration and as a Hope that one day the road to Calvary would come to an end, that they would reach their journey's end—and find their loved onewaiting.
The Unholy Fear
She didn't object to the celebrations for the anniversary of the signing of Armistice—in fact, she quite enjoyed them—but she did object to the few minutes' silent remembrance of the Glorious Dead. It depressed her. She brought out the old "tag" so beloved of people who dread sadness, even reverential sadness, that "the world is full enough of sorrow without adding to it unnecessarily!" Not much sorrow had come her way, except the sorrow of not always getting her own way; and the anniversary of the Armistice meant for her the Victory Ball at the Albert Hall, a new dress of silver and paste diamonds, a fat supper, and that jolly feeling of believing that a real "beano" is justified because, after all,wewon the war, didn't we? Therefore, she disliked this bringing back to the world of the tragic fact—the fact of what war really means beyond the patriotic talk of politicians, the Victory celebrations, the rush to pick up the threads which had to be dropped in 1914, and the excitement of getting, or missing, or declining the O.B.E. The war is over, she keeps saying to herself, thus inferring to everybody that they ought to forget all about it now. So she ignores the maimed and the wrecked, the war poor, the sailors and the soldiers, war books, war songs, all reference to the war, in fact, and most especially the dead. "Why should we be depressed?" she keeps crying, "the world is sad enough. . . ." Well, you know the old "tag" of those who are not so much frightened of sorrow as frightened by the fact that they can neither sympathise with it nor understand it. She is an exceptional case, you declare. But alas! she isn't. There are thousands of men and women who, behind a plea of war-weariness, really mean a desire to forget all those memories, all those obligations, all that work and faith in a New and Better World which alone make justified—this war, or any other war. She has not forgotten, so much as never realised what men suffered and endured in order that she, and all the rest of her "clan" who remained at home, might live on and rebuild the happiness and fortunes of their lives. So she dislikes to be reminded of her obligations to the Present and the Future; she dislikes to remember in reverence and sorrow the men and boys who, without this war, would now be continuing happily, safe and sound, the even tenor of their lives. "The world is sad enough," she again reiterates, and . . . oh, well, just BOSH!
The Need to Remember
For myself, I consider that it would do the world good if it had one wholedayof silent remembrance each year. And if it be depressing—well, that will be all to the good. The world will come to no harm if it be depressed once a year—depressed for such a noble cause. After all, we give up one day per year to the solemn remembrance of the One who died for us—it would not, therefore, do anything but good if we were to give up one day a year to the memory of those millions who died for us no less. Sunday, too, is kept as a quiet day, in order that the world may be encouraged to contemplate those ideals for which it has erected churches in which it bows the knee. Well, one whole day in the year given up to the memory of those who died that the civilised world might live—who also died for an ideal—will help us to remember that they died at all. Without some such enforced remembrance, the world will, alas! only too quickly forget. And in forgettinghowthey died, will also forgetwhat they died for. Some people—the vast majority perhaps—will never remember unless remembrance is forced upon them. And if the world ever forgets the Glorious Dead, and the "heritage" which these Glorious Dead left to those who still live on—well, don't talk to me of Christianity and civilisation and the clap-trap of those high ideals which everyone prates of, few understand, and still fewer strive to live up to. If the war has not yet taught the political and social and Christian world wisdom, nothing ever will; and, moreover, it does not deserve to learn. Yet, only the other day, I heard some elderly gentlemen discussing the next war—as if the last one were but a slight skirmish far away amid the hills of Afghanistan. Well, better an era of the most revolutionary socialism than that the world should once again be plunged into such another tragedy as it has passed through during the last five years.
Humanity
"Humanity is one, and an injury to one member is an injury to the whole." I cull this line from Mr. Gilbert Cannan's book, "The Anatomy of Society." And I quote it because I believe that it sums up in a few words, not only the world-politics of the future, but the religion—the real, practical religion, and therefore the only religion which counts in so far as this life is concerned—of the future as well. The snowball—if I may thus describe it symbolically—has just begun to roll, but it will gather weight and impetus with every succeeding year, until, at last, there will be no nations—as we understand nations to-day—but onlyonenation, and that nation the whole of the human race. The times are dead, or rather they are dying, which saw civilisation most clearly in such things as the luxury of the Ritz Hotels, the parks and palaces of Europe, the number of tube trains and omnibuses running per hour along the rail and roadways of London, and the imitation silk stockings in which cooks and kitchenmaids disport themselves on Sundays. A New Knowledge is abroad—and that New Knowledge is a fuller realisation that the new world is for all men and all women who work and do their duty, for all humanity, and not merely for the few who get rich upon the exploitation of poverty and helplessness of the masses. And this realisation carries with it the realisation that the governments of the future will be more really governments of the people for the people—and by people I do not mean merely those of Britain or France, or whichever nation men happen to belong to, but humanity all over the world. The things which nowadays only money can buy must be brought within the grasp of the poorest, and civilisation must be recognised as comingfrom the bottom upwards, and not only from thetop—a kind of golden froth which strives to hide the dirt and misery and suffering beneath. So long as slums exist, so long as poverty is exploited, so long as the great masses of men and women are forced to lead sordid, unbeautiful, cramped, hopeless, and helpless lives, as they are forced to live now—call no nation civilised. So long as these things exist—call no nation religious. The one is a mockery of human life; the other is a mockery of God.
It always strikes me that the greatest lack in all education—and this applies to the education of princes as well as paupers—is the spirit of splendid vision. Most things are taught, except the "vision" of self-respect and responsibility. The poor are not taught to respect themselves at all, and certainly their lives do not give them what their education has forgotten. They are never encouraged to learn that each individual man and woman is not only responsible to him and herself, but to all men and all women. Certainly the rich never teach it them. For the last thing which rich people ever realise is that their wealth carries with it human obligations, human responsibilities, as well as the gratifications of their own appetites and pleasures. The only objects of education seem to be to teach men to make money, nothing is ever done to teach them how best to make life full of interest, full of human worth, full of those "visions" which will help to make the future or the human race proud in its achievements. The failure of education as an intellectual, social, and moral force is best shown the moment men and women are given the opportunity to do exactly as they please. Metaphorically speaking, the poor with money in their pockets immediately go on the "booze," and the rich "jazz." And men of the poor work merely for the sake of being able to booze, and the rich merely for the sake of being able to jazz. And the rich condemn the poor for boozing, and the poor condemn the rich for jazzing—but this, of course, is one of life's little ironies.
Responsibility
Personally, I blame the poor for boozing less than I blame the rich for "jazzing." If I had to live the lives which millions of working men and women lead, and amid the same surroundings, and with the same hopeless future—I would booze with the booziest. You can't expect the poor to respect themselves when the rich do not respect them. Without any feeling of human responsibility in the wealthier classes, you cannot expect to find any human responsibility in the lower orders. And by human responsibility I do not mean some vague thing like "Government for the People," or subscriptions to hospitals, or bazaars for the indigent blind, or anything of that sort—though these things are excellent in themselves. I mean something more practical than that. Hospitals should be state-owned, and the indigent blind should be pensioned by the state. These things should not be left to private enterprises, since they are human responsibilities and should be borne by humanity. I mean that all owners of wealth should be made to realise their moral responsibilities to their own workmen—the men and women who help to create their wealth—and that with poverty there should not go dirt and drudgery and that total lack of beauty and encouragement to a cleaner, finer life without which existence on earth is Hell—Hell being preached at from above.
The Government of the Future
The worst of government by the people is that the moment the people put them into power they are gracefully forgotten. The onlyrealgovernment by the people comes through the people themselves in the form of disturbances and strikes and revolutions. Then, alas, the tiny craft of Progress is borne towards the ocean on a river of bad blood—which means waste and unnecessary suffering, and leaves a whole desert of anger and revenge behind it. The most crying need of the times is the very last to be heard by governments. They are so engrossed in the financial prosperity of the country that they forget the social and moral prosperity altogether—and financial prosperity without social and moral progress is but the beginning of bankruptcy after all. A government, to be a real government and so to represent authority in the eyes of the people, has not only to nurse and to harbour, but also torebuild. It does something more than govern. It has been placed thereby the peoplein order that it may help rebuild the livesof the people—so that, besides helping capital to increase and develop, it at the same time safeguards the people against exploitation by capital, and sees to it that, through this capital, the people are enabled to live cleaner, better, happier lives, are given an equal chance in the world, and encouraged and given the opportunity to live self-respecting lives—lives full not only of responsibility to themselves, but to humanity at large. That to my mind is the true socialism—and it is a socialism which could come within the next ten years, and without any sign of revolution, were the Government to realise that it is something more than the foster-mother of capital—that it is also a practical rebuilder of the human race—yes, even though it has to cut through all the red-tape in the world and throw the vested interests, owners and employers, on the scrap-heap of things inimical to human happiness in the bulk. Sometimes I think that the franchise of women will do a great deal towards this juster world when it comes. Women have no "political sense," it is said. Well, thank God they haven't, say I! They have thehuman sense—and that will be the only political sense of any importance in the world of to-morrow.
And this war has been the great revelation. Masses of men and women who never thought before—or, rather, who thought but vaguely, not troubling to put their thoughts into words—have by war become articulate. They are now looking for a leader, and upon their faces there is the expression of disappointment. They do not yet realise that they have discovered within their own minds and hearts that Splendid Vision which once came through one, or, at most, a small group of individuals. This vision is the vision of humanity as apart from the vision of one special nation. It sees a new world in which science, the practical knowledge and the material advancement of the West, combine with the greater peace and happiness of the East, to make of this world an abiding place, an ideal nearer the ideal of Heaven. Man, after all, possesses mind. His failure has been that, so far, he has not learned wisdom—the wisdom to employ that mind for the realisation of his own soul—that realisation without which life becomes a mockery and civilisation a sham.
The Question
Can a man love two women at the same time? If he be married to one of them—Yes. If he isn't—well, I cannot imagine it possible. Nor can I imagine that every man is capable of this double passion. Some people (in parenthesis, the lucky ones!) have characters so simple, so direct, so steadfast, so very peaceful. Their soul is not torn asunder, first this way, then that, perfectly sincere in all its varying moods, though the mood changes like the passing seasons. Once having liked a thing, they like it always, and the opposite has no attraction for them. These people are, as it were, born husbands and born wives. They are faithful, though their fidelity may not be exciting. This type could hardly love two people, though they are quite capable of loving twice. As individuals they are to be envied, because for them the inner life is one of simplicity and peace. But there are other people who, as it were, seem to be borntwo people. They are capable of infinite goodness; also they are capable of the most profound baseness. And never, never, never are they happy. For the good that is in them suffers for the bad, and the bad also suffers, since it knows that it is unworthy. So their inner life is one long struggle to attain that ideal of perfection which they prize more than anything else in the world, but are incapable of reaching—or, rather, they are incapable ofsustaining—because, within their natures, there is a "kink" which always thwarts their good endeavour. Thus for ever do they suffer, since within their souls there is a perpetual warfare between the good which is within them and the bad. These people, I say, can love two people at the same time, since two different people seem to inhabit the same body, and both yearn to be satisfied; bothmustbe satisfied at some time or another. The Good within them will always triumph eventually, even though the Bad must have its day. But do not blame these people. They suffer far more than anyone can suspect. They suffer, and only with old age or death does peace come to them. If there are people born to be unhappy in this world, they are surely in the forefront of that tragic army!
The Two Passions
Yet these people, as I said before,must be marriedto one of the two Adored, if their sentiment for each can be called Love. Love, in which passion plays the larger part, is so all-absorbing while it lasts, that only the deep affection and respect which may come through the intimacy of matrimony can exist within the self-same heart great enough to be called Love. A man may adore and worship the woman who has proved herself a perfect mate, who is the mother of his children, and yet be unfaithful to her—not with any woman who crosses his path and beckons, but with theOnewho appeals to the wild, romantic adventurer which is also part of his nature, though neither the best part, nor the strongest. But I cannot imagine a man adoring and respecting a woman who is not his wife the while he loves with a burning passion another woman who promises rapture, passion, and delight. Passion is so intense while it lasts that there is in the heart of man no equal place for another woman who holds him by no legal and moral tie. But a man, having a double nature, can worship his wife, yet love with passion another woman—even though he hates and despises himself for so doing. But it is rare, if not impossible, for one woman to completely satisfy the man whose nature is made up of good and bad, of high ideals and low cravings, of steadfast fidelity, yet with a yearning for the wild, untrammelled existence of the mountain tops. With such a man—and how many there are, if we but knew!—the woman he respects will always win in the end, even though the woman who entices has also her day of victory. The Good Woman will suffer—God knows she will! But the man will suffer too. A man has to be wholly bad to thoroughly enjoy evil. The man who is only half a saint—secretly goes through hell. That is his punishment, and it is far more difficult for him to bear than the finger pointed in contempt. Therefore, I believe that the happiest men and women are the men and women who are born good and steadfast, simple and true, or those who cultivate with delight scarcely one unselfish thought. That is why the vast majority of people live so really lonely, so secretly sad at heart and soul. Only the born-good or the born-bad know the blessedness of inner peace.
Our "Secret Escapes"
I suppose that we all of us have our own little secret "dream-sanctuary"—our way-of-escape which nobody knows anything about, and by which we go when we are weary of the trivialities of the domestic hearth and sick unto death of the "cackle-cackle" of the crowds. When we are very young we long to share this secret little dream-sanctuary with someone else. When we are older and wiser, we realise that if we don't keep it to ourselves we are spiritually lost; for, with the best intentions in the world, the best-beloved, to whom in rapture we give the key, either, metaphorically speaking, leaves the front gate open or goes therein and turns on a gramophone. We come into this world alone, and we leave it by ourselves; and the older we grow the more we realise that, in spite of our own heart's longing to share, we are most really at peace when we are quite alone in our own company. When we are young we hope and expect our "dreams" to become one day a glorious reality. When we are older we realise that our "dreams" will always remain "dreams", and, strange as it may sound, they become more real to us, even as "dreams," than do any realities—except bores and toothache. For the "dreams" of youth become the "let's pretend" of age. And the person who has forgotten the game of "let's pretend" is in soul-colour of the dulness of ditch-water. And "let's pretend" is a game which we can best play by ourselves. Even the proximity of a living being, content to do and say nothing, robs it of its keenest enjoyment. No, we must be by ourselves for the world around us to seem really inhabited by people we love the most amid surroundings nearest our ideal. There are no bores in our dream-world. Nothing disagreeable happens there. And, thank Heaven, we can enter it almost anywhere—sometimes if we merely close our eyes! And we can be our real selves in this dream-world of ours too, there is nobody to say us nay; there are no laws and no false morals; we are fairy kings and queens in a fairy kingdom. I always pity the man or woman who is no monarch in this very real kingdom of shadows which lies all around us, and which we can enter to reign therein whenever the human "jar" is safely out of the way. There we can be our true selves and live our true life, in what seems a very real world—a world, moreover, which we hope one day will be the reality of Heaven.
My Escape and Some Others
Everybody, as I said before, has his or her own receipt for "getting away." Some find it in long "chats" over the fireside with old friends; some in reading and music and art; some in travel, some in "good works" and just a few in "bad" ones. A new hat will often lift a woman several floors nearer to the seventh heaven. A good dinner in prospect will sometimes elevate the spirit of man out of the dreary "rut" and give thatsoupçonof something-to-live-for which can take the ordinary everyday and turn it into a day which belongs to theextraordinary. For myself, I like to get out into the country alone; or, if I can't do that, or the weather sees to it that I shan't, I like to get by myself—anywhere to dream, or, preferably, to explore some unknown district or street or place in my own company. Sometimes I find that to open a new book or a favourite old one, soon takes the edge off "edgyness," and makes me see that the pin-pricks of life are merely pin-pricks, from which, unless there are too many of them, I shan't die, however much I may suffer. But even when reading—I like best to read alone—I am never really at ease when at any moment a companion may suddenly break the silence and bring me back to reality by asking the unseen listening gods "if they've locked the cat out?" You condemn me? Well, perhaps I am wrong. And if you can find happiness perpetually surrounded by people, then I envy you. It is so much easier to go through life requiring nothing but food, friends, and a bank balance, than always to hide misanthropic tendencies behind a social smile. I envy you, because I realise that the fight to be alone, the fight to be yourself, is the longest fight of all—and it lays you open to suspicion, unfriendliness, even dislike, everywhere you go. But, if I must be honest, I will confess that Ihatesocial pastimes. To work and to dream, to travel, to listen to music, to be in England in the springtime, to read, to give of myself to those who most specially need me—if any there be?—that is what I now call happiness, the rest is merely boredom in varying degree. My only regret is that one has generally to live so long to discover what the constituents of happiness are, or what is worth while and what worthless; what makes you feel that the everyday is a day well spent, and not a day merely got through somehow or other. You lose so much of your youth, and the best years of your life, trying to find happiness along those paths where other people informed you that it lay. It takes so many years of experience to realise that most of the things which men call "pleasure" are but, as it were, tough dulness covered with piquant sauce—a tough mess of which, when you tire of the piquant sauce the toughness remains just so long as you go on trying to eat it.
Over the Fireside
Most especially do I feel sorry for those people who cannot find a certain illusion of happiness in reading. I thank whatever gods there be that I can generally find the means of "getting-away" between the covers of a book. A book has to be very puerile indeed if I cannot enjoy it to a certain extent—even though that extent be merely a mild ridicule and amusement. I can even enjoy books about books—if they are very well done, which is rare. I am not particularly interested in authors—especially the photographs of authors, which usually come upon their admirers with something approaching shock—because I always think that the most interesting part of an author is what he writes, not what he looks like. What he writes is generally what heis. You can't keep everything of yourself out of anything you may write—and thank Heaven for it! Apart from the story—often indeed, before the story itself—the most delightful parts of any book are the little gleams of the writer's point of view, of his philosophy, of his own life-experiences, which glint through the matter in hand, and sometimes raise a commonplace narrative into a volume of sheer entrancing joy. And perhaps one of the most difficult things to write is to write about books—I don't mean "reviews." (Almost anybody can give their opinion on books they have read, and tell you something about them—which is nine hundred and ninety per cent. of literary reviews.) But to write about books in a way which amuses you, or interests you, and makes you want immediately to read the book in question—that is a more difficult feat. And sometimes what the writer about books says about books is more entertaining than the books themselves. But then that is because of those little gleams of the personal which are always so delightful to find anywhere.
Faith Reached Through Bitterness and Loss
Looking back on one's life, I always think it is so strange that just those blows of fate which logic would consider as certain to destroy such things as Faith and Belief, optimism and steadfastness of soul-vision, so many times provide their very foundations. How often those whose Belief in a Life Hereafter is the firmest have little reason to encourage that belief. We often find through sorrow, a happiness—no, not happiness, but a peace—which is enduring. When the waves of agnosticism and atheism have broken over our souls, the ebb tide is so often Faith and Hope. And, as we approach nearer and nearer to the time when, in the ordinary course of events, we so soonshall know, there creeps into our hearts a certainty that all is not ended with life, a belief which defies reason, and logic, and common sense, and which, to outsiders, often appears to be merely a clutching at straws. But these straws save us, and, through their means, we eventually reach the shore where doubts cannot flourish and agnosticism gives way to a Faith which wefeelmore than we can actually define.
Aristocracy and Democracy
I believe in theheartof democracy, but I am extremely suspicious of itshead. Popular education among the masses is the most derelict thing in all our much-vaunted civilisation. To talk to the masses concerning anything outside the radius of their own homes and stomachs is, for the most part, like talking to children. It is not their fault. They have never had a real chance to be otherwise. When I contemplate the kind of education which the average child of the slums and country villages is given—and the type of man and woman who is popularly supposed to be competent to give it—I do not wonder that they are the victims of any firebrand, crank, or plutocrat who comes to them and sails into the Mother-of-All-Parliaments upon their votes. For the last six years I have been placed in circumstances which have enabled me to observe the results of what education has done for the average poor man. The result has made me angry and appalled. The figure is low when I declare that ninety per cent. of the poor not only cannot write the King's English, but can neither read it nor understand it—beyond the everyday common words which a child of twelve uses in his daily vocabulary. Of history, of geography, of the art and literature of his country, of politics or law, of domestic economy—he knows absolutely nothing. Nothing of any real value is taught him. Even what he knows he knows so imperfectly that absolute ignorance were perhaps a healthier mental state. Until education is regarded with the same seriousness as the law, it is hopeless to expect a new and better world. For education is the very foundation of this finer existence. You can't expect an A1 nation among B3 intellects. Ornamental education is not wanted—it is worse than useless until auseful educationhas been inculcated. And what is a useful education? It is an education which teaches a man and woman to be of some immediate use in the world; to know something of the world in which they live, and how best to fulfil their duty as useful members of a community and in the world at large. At present the average boy and girl are, as it were, educationally dragged up anyhow and launched upon the world at the first possible moment to earn the few shillings which two hands and an undeveloped intelligence are worth in the labour market. No wonder there is Bolshevism and class war and anarchy and revolution. Where the ruled are ignorant and the ruling selfish—you can never expect to found a new and happier world.
Duty
As for a sense of duty, to talk to the average man and woman, no matter what may be their class in life, of a sense of duty, is rather like reading Shakespeare to a man who is stone deaf. And yet, an education which does not at the same time seek to teach duty—duty to oneself, to the state, to humanity at large—is no real education at all. But in the world in which we live at present, a sense of duty is regarded as nonsense. Labour does not realise its duties, neither does wealth; neither does the Church, except to churchmen; nor Parliament, except to the party which provides its funds. And yet, as I said before, a sense of duty is the very foundation of all real education.
Even if the children of the poor were taught the rudiments of some trade while they were at school, the years they spend there would not be so utterly and entirely wasted. Even though they did not follow up that trade as their occupation in life, it would at any rate give them some useful interest in their hours of recreation. As it is they know nothing, so they are interested in nothing. And this, of course, applies to the so-called educated people as well. It always amuses me to listen to the well-to-do discussing the working classes. To hear them one would think that the working classes were the only people who wasted their time, their money, and their store of health. It never seems to strike them that the working classes for the most part live in surroundings which contain no interest whatsoever—apart from their work. They are given education—andsucheducation! They are given homes—andsuchhomes! They are plentifully supplied with public houses—and ye gods, such public houses! The Government hardly realises yet that it is there, not to listen to its own voice and keep its own little tin-pot throne intact, but as a means by which the masses may arrive at a healthier, better, more worthy state of existence. The working-classes are not Bolshevik, nor do I think they ever will be; but deep down in their hearts there is a determination that they and their children shall receive the same educational advantages, the same right to air and light and decent amusement, as the children of the wealthy. Because I am poor, they say to themselves, why should I therefore have to inhabit a home unfit for decent habitation, receive education utterly useless from every practical point of view—be forced to live in surroundings which absolutely invite degradation of both mind and body? There will always be poverty, but there ought never to be indecent poverty. Better education; better housing; better chances for healthy recreation—these are the things for which the masses are clamouring. Why is it wrong for a workman who has made money during the war to buy a piano—and to hear people talk that seems to be one of their most dastardly crimes—when it is quite all right for his employer, who has made more money out of the war, to pay five pounds for one good dinner, or a night's "jazzing"?
Sweeping Assertions from Particular Instances
And this mention of the piano-crime among the munition-makers brings me to another fact—how utterly impossible it is for the majority of people to judge any big scheme without having regard to the particular instances which threaten its success. Because some working people are so utterly bestial that they are unfit to live in decent homes—so the majority of poor people are unworthy of better surroundings. You might just as well judge the ruling classes by the few units who advertise their own extravagant tom-fooleries! In all questions of reform you have to work, as it were, up to the vision of an ideal. The real, however disappointing at the outset, will eventually reach the higher plane—of that I am certain. And in no question am I more certain of this than in the question of the working classes. The heart of democracy, as I said before, is absolutely in the right place; only its "head" is as yet undeveloped. Its mental "view" is restricted—and no wonder! Everything that has so far been done has helped to restrict that view. This war has let more "light" into the "soul" of democracy than all the national so-called education which has ever been devised and made compulsory. Confiscation of property and all those other tom-fool cries are but the screams of a handful of silly Bolsheviks. There is no echo in the heart of the real labouring men and women. If they applaud it, it is only that these cranks, at least, seem to be fighting for that human right to an equal share of the common good things of this life which ought to be the possession of all labour, however lowly. Take the education of the masses out of the hands of the for the most part ignorant men and women who nowadays make it their profession to teach it; raise the standard of payment so that this all-important branch of citizenship will encourage educated and refined men and women to take up that duty—and give the working classes decent homes, plenty of air, and the chance of healthful recreation close at hand, and you have solved the most vital labour problems of this old world of ours and laid the foundation stones of the new.
How I came to make "History"!
Only those who have worked in the offices of an important newspaper, know that the Power Behind the Throne—which is the Editorial Chair—is rarely the Church, scarcely ever the State, infrequently the Capitalist, andneverLabour,—but simply the Advertisement Department.
I was sitting the other afternoon—dreaming, as is my wont; and smoking cigarettes, which is one of my bad habits,—when the head-representative of this unseen Power rushed into my sanctum.
"Will you do something for me?" he demanded, with that beneficent smile on his face which, through experience, I have discovered to be the prelude of most disagreeable demands.
"Certainly," I answered, inwardly collecting my scattered brains preparatory to a brilliant defence. "What is it?"
Without more ado he, as it were, threw his bomb.
"Will you write me an Essay on Corsets?"
"Onwhat?" I asked incredulously—knowing that he had been a distinguished soldier, and suspecting that he had suddenly developed what the soldiers describe as "a touch of the doolally."
"OnCorsets!"
"But I don't know anything about them," I protested, "except that I should not like to wear them!"
"That doesn't matter," he answered reassuringly. "All we want is a page of 'matter.'"
Then he proceeded to explain that he had secured several highly-paid advertisements from the leading corsetières, and that his "bright idea" was to connect them together by an essay illustrated by their wares, in order that those who read might be attracted to buy.
Then he left me.
"Just write a history of corsets," he cried out laughing. Then, by way of decorating the "bitter pill" with jam, he added: "I'msureyou'll do itsplendidly!"
"Splendidly" I know I could not do it, but to do it—rather amused me.
After all, there is one benefit in writing of something you know nothing about (and you are certain that ninety-nine per cent. of your readers will not be able to enlighten you) the necessity for accuracy does not arise. And so, I settled myself down to invent "history," and, if my historical narrative is all invention, I can defend myself by saying that if it isn'ttrue—itmight be. And many historical romances cannot boast even that defence.
Most people who write about the early history of the world have to guess a good deal; so I don't see why I shouldn't state emphatically that, after years and years and years of profound research, the first corset "happened" when Eve suddenly discovered that she was showing signs of middle-age in the middle. So she plaited some reeds together, tied them tightly round her waist-line, and, sure enough, Adam had to put off making that joke about "Once round Eve's waist, twice round the Garden of Eden" for many moons. But Eve, I suppose, discovered later on, as many a woman has also discovered since her day, that, though a tight belt maketh the waistline small, the body bulgeth above and below eventually. So Eve began making a still wider plait—chasing, as it were, the "bulge" all over her body. In this manner she at last became encased in a belt wide enough to imprison her torso quite _un_comfortably, but "she kept her figure"—or thought she did—and thus easily passed for one hundred and fifty years old when, in reality, she was over six hundred.
And every woman who is an "Eve" at heart has followed in her time the example of the mother of all of 'em. As they begin to fatten, so they begin to tighten, and the inevitable and consequential "bulge" is imprisoned as it "bulgeth" until nocorsetièrecan do more for them than hint that men like their divinities a trifle plump in places. But to arrive at this—the last and only consolation—a woman has to become rigidly encased from her thighs almost to her neck. She can scarcely walk and she can hardly breathe, and the fat which must go somewhere has usually gone to her neck, but—thank Heaven!—"she has kept her figure" (or she likes to think she has), and many a woman would sooner lose her character than lose her "line."
You may think that this only applies to frivolous and silly women, but you are wrong. It applied even to goddesses! Historians inform us that the haughty Juno, discovering that her husband, Jupiter, was going the way of all flesh and nearly every husband, borrowed her girdle from Venus, with the result that when Jupiter returned home that evening from business, he stayed with his wife—the club calling him in vain. Thus was Juno justified of her "tightness."
But then, many a wife has cause to look upon a well-cut corset as her best friend. And many a husband, too, has every reason to be grateful to that article of his wife's apparel which the vulgarwillcall "stays." In earlier days a husband used to lock his wife in a pair of iron-bound corsets when he went away from home, keeping the key in his pocket, and thus not caring a tinker's cuss if his home were simply overflowing with handsome gentleman lodgers! The poor wife couldn't retaliate by locking her husband in such a virtuous prison, because men never wore such things—which, perhaps, was one or the reasons why they didn't, who knows?
Also, the corset—or rather, the "bulge" of middle-age, which was the real cause of their ever being worn—has always strongly influenced the fashions. I don't know it as a positive fact, though I suspect it to be true nevertheless, that the woman of fashion who first discovered that no amount of iron bars could keep her from bulging in the right place, but to the wrong extent, suddenly, thought of the pannier and the crinoline and—well, that's whereshefound that she was laughing. For almost any woman can make her waist-line small: her trouble only really comes when she has to tackle other parts of her anatomy which begin to show the thickening of Anno Domini. Panniers and the crinoline save her an enormous amount of mental agony. On the principle of "What the eye doesn't see, to the imagination looks beautiful"—the early Victorian lady was wise in her generation, and her modern sister, who shows the world most things without considering whether what she exhibits is worth looking at, is an extremely foolish person. One thing, however, which women have never been able to fix definitely, isexactly whereher waist should be. Men know where it is, and they put their arms round it instinctively whenever they get the chance. But women change their mind about it every few years. Sometimes it is down-down-down, and sometimes it is under their armpits. A few years ago a woman who had what is known as a "short waist" was referred to by other women as a "Poor Thing." Then the short-waisted woman came into fashion—or rather, fashions fashioned themselves for her benefit—and her long-waisted sister had to struggle to make her waist look to be where really her ribs were. Only a few weeks back a woman's waist and bust and hips had all to be definitely defined. Nowadays they bundle them all, as it were, into clothes cut in a sack-line, and are the very last letter of the very latest word in fashion. I can well imagine that a few years hence women will be as severely corseted as they were a short time ago.